Shange (Mountain Songs)
Open-air songs with free rhythm, high tessitura and improvised verses
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Shange is a major folk-song genre, alongside work songs and xiaodiao: sung in the hills, fields, pastures or on the road, with high tessitura, free rhythm and improvised words, and long trailing phrases. It voices the life in front of the singer and the feeling inside, leaning toward lyricism and courtship rather than coordinating labour or entertaining an audience.
Regional forms differ widely: xintianyou in northern Shaanxi, hua'er in Gansu and Qinghai, pashandiao in Inner Mongolia, and Hakka mountain songs, each with its own tunes and phrasing. Shange is a folk-song genre, not an instrumental genre or an opera genre; it has no fixed metrical frame, and the same song may differ at every singing. What a field record should preserve is often not the "correct notes" but the free breath.
Read deeper → Xintianyou
Sources
- 山歌作为民歌体裁的特征、与号子、小调的分野及各地歌种，参《中国音乐词典》与 The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, "China" 相关条目；本文为原创表述
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